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Identifying and realizing growth potentials in your sales organization

Realizing significant sales and turnover increases is a particular challenge in mature and stagnating markets. Still, most companies have ambitious growth objectives: They want to grow faster than the market and, ideally, achieve double-digit growth rates. What can the sales organization do to leverage additional sales and turnover potential in this situation?

A pragmatic 5-step approach has proved to be successful:

• Identify your Customers´ total Potential
  Do you know each customer´s total potential for your offering? To find out, you need facts and figures about the development of your customer´s business. Possible sources of information are, e.g., personal conversations with your contacts, the customer´s website and the business press (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Handelsblatt, etc.). A systematic analysis often leads to surprising insights: E.g. you may learn that the customer has just purchased another company or that he is entering a new field of activity. Armed with this information you can ask the ´right´ questions in your next meeting and possibly identify additional sales potential for your products.
• Realize Cross Selling Opportunities
  The better you know your customer´s business, the better you can realize cross-selling opportunities. If you have built a longtime, successful relationship, the customer will listen to you when you present a new product which complements the one you already supply, thus offering a total solution. If you cannot produce the complementary product yourself, it may be purchased from other companies which don´t compete with you.
• Offer Product-enhancing Services
  Many companies increasingly focus on their core competences and outsource other activities to cut costs. Perhaps you can support your customers here by taking over maintenance and repair work or by training their people. Services offer you the possibility to provide added value to your customer and to build a highly-profitable new business for your company. To make this work, you should either have the required competences already in place or you have to build them.
• Regain lost Customers
  Lost customers are not necessarily lost forever: Perhaps they are no longer satisfied with their current suppliers; decision makers may have been replaced or the company has completely new requirements which your competitors cannot meet. Contact these companies regularly with an interesting new offer. As a ´hook´ you can, e.g., refer to a press release on the company´s website which may inform you about a new line of business that the customer is currently developing. Perhaps you can provide exactly the right solution which helps the customer realize his new strategy!
• Analyze Market Reports
  Compare your sales plan with market development forecasts published in market reports. Although the latter usually refer to the total market or market segments, not to individual companies, they can help you to check your figures for consistency. Imagine, e.g. a situation where a report forecasts a 10 % growth of the total market for the coming year, but your consolidated sales plan only shows a 4% plus. This should prompt you to ask some critical questions, like: Are the figures in the market report correct? How is the market defined in the report? Is your plan perhaps too conservative? Should you concentrate more on high-growth niches within an overall stagnating market?

The 5 steps above show that, even in mature and stagnating markets, growth opportunities can be identified and acted upon using a systematic approach and creative thinking.

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